+5 Whiteboard of Excellence… | StupidRanger.com Star Wars quote or something to chuckle about upon my return Instead my initial request was erased and replaced by well THIS As you can see I work with a bunch of hyper nerds My favorite For Sale Unicorn 5000 GP or Trade for Pictures of J Alba How I love my coworkers from Dante epic gencon 2010 rpgbloggers wtf One Response leave one John permalink August 20 2010 That

Nobody Wants To Hear About Your Character | StupidRanger.com turned out this person happened to be an artist by the name of Adam Black I hadn t seen his work before but it was plain to me pretty much immediately that this dude was really good at his craft and he deeply understood what Bat Loaf was about Adam runs a site called Monsters Nekkid Ladies NSFW duh the contents of which are pretty self explanatory Lots of demons and boobs and swords and monsters And demon boobs Adam also draws a really excellent webcomic called Locus NSFW again and he created the now sadly defunct KISS 4K webcomic Yes for that KISS Basically I m not sure I could have asked for a better person to draw Bat Loaf had I done an exhaustive search of the planet to find one and here he was offering to draw him A couple days ago Adam got me the finished piece As you may have guessed I am about to vibrate into tiny little pieces due to the criminal levels of excellence applied to this picture of my bard In all seriousness I have to thank Adam from the bottom of my heart for doing this for me I m just happy to have written something that made people laugh and to have someone so skilled magically appear and bring one of my favorite creations to life in such detail was one of the most excellent things that s ever happened to me Please go to his site and show the man some love It s the metal thing to do Just think this never would have happened if I hadn t blogged about my character And as you can see the mission my character set out to accomplish atop the Tarrasque was a resounding success from bat loaf E

Joys of Playing an Epic Character | StupidRanger.com that as your character gains awesome spells feats skills enemies will also gain spells feats skills You think your party s wizard is pretty awesome now wait til you see the spells the evil wizard can cast Hope your character s reflex save improved too When I Grow Up I m a huge proponent of career planning making decisions early so you know what your character wants to be when they grow up Unfortunately my optimism doesn t usually survive to 20th level I had a mid character life crisis upon realizing that I didn t know what to do next in terms of career development for Ari I have since overcome that particular obstacle by finding a new prestige class that compliments her combat style One of the harder parts of growing epic is the need to keep your character exciting to have something toward which you can look forward as your character gains new levels For me and Ari it was finding another prestige class for you it might be the need to start inventing your own spells Figure out what keeps you excited about gaining a new level and build that into your character development Playing an

Behind the Screen: The Perils of Being Epic | StupidRanger.com give to the players or at very least handwave downtime and allow them to travel and purchase whatever they desire with their treasure That pizazz can backfire in a glorious way at epic levels especially when you need to either add drama by endangering a player character or even a highly thought of NPC One of our players Sir Geekelot used all of his treasure during our years of in game downtime to procure a Staff of Life I didn t quite realize this until he quite humorously produced said staff and deigned that he would bludgeon the life back into two fallen NPC cohorts that had fallen to the aforementioned baddies Now was this a mistake for me to make such powerful items available Yes and no I should ve kept tabs better on what they were purchasing but if you release an 18th level character to the world with a pile of well earned treasure and give him years to do whatever he feels like it stands to pretty good reason if he dedicated himself to getting that item then he should be able to do it That run on sentence makes a good deal of sense to me but yet it adds extra complexity when trying to add suspense drama or simply just speed up the group by blowing out a few cohorts for good More Comin Well I ve taken only two lessons learned from dipping our toes into the epic waters and written a novelette so I will leave it here for now Expect to see more on this topic as weeks pass doing some analysis to grow my skills in public will be interesting at the least from behind the screen co DM Dante epic gm tips rpgbloggers 3 Responses leave one kanati permalink

Chronicles of Shandahar | StupidRanger.com and I m sure several of you have experienced the same thing after coming home from a convention I sometimes forget all the stuff I bought this year I kinda forgot about the Shandahar books But once I found them again I could not stop reading them The books are well written and very engrossing It is easy to become emotionally invested in the characters and who doesn t love a struggle of good versus evil where you really hope good will win but you are a little nervous to turn the page in case things go wrong I visited their website and I was not surprised to learn that these books were based on a campaign There is so much in the storyline that reminds me of epic adventures in which I ve played that I can almost picture friends at a table rolling dice making spot checks or casting spells or attacking the Big Bad I m near the end of the second book and I have to admit I don t want to end it because I m going to be so sad when it s over But at the same time I can t wait to

Gamer’s Crack | StupidRanger.com given d20 can only play so many 20 before needing a recharge That s why some of us buy new sets every new campaign DM included Of course our fellow player Yan who refuses to believe the undeniable logic of our polyhedral creed is not allowed to touch our beloved shiny new dice And his dice punish him for it Yan permalink September 5 2007 Well at least I don t have any addiction to fight off That being said I m well in the lower curves of the probability bell in regard of my dice result the part where it looks like a line Being a scientific minded guy I won t admit that you might have stumble onto a greater truth Stupid Ranger permalink September 5 2007 In addition to my addiction to the dice I too believe that a d20 only has so many 20 s and no one should ever ever borrow mine for fear of wasting those 20 s And Yan it s okay if you don t have the dice addiction that just means there s more for the rest of us Yacine permalink September 5 2007 I have an issue with people just rolling dice for no reason but I often find myself doing the same These dice indeed have power over us Vanir permalink September 5 2007 My dice run either super hot or super cold Some nights it seems like I get more critical hits and misses than I do regular rolls And the Stupid Ranger does too loan her d20 s out on occasion But they re always the weird puke colored ones from the Chessex tub at Gen Con They usually roll better than mine though so I can t really complain Stupid Ranger permalink September 5 2007 If I don t loan out those random d20 s that lurk in the bottom of my dice bag they will never get recharged to their full 20 potential Yax permalink September 5 2007 Recharged I might have to review my diceology I just thought dice hava a maximum good uses out of them It my opinion some dice are just too old and their mojo is gone forever Dr Rotwang permalink September 6 2007 My wife and I received as a wedding gift two one day passes to Star Wars Celebration II We went up for the day and marvelled at the amount of associated swag crammed in the Indianapolis Convention Center We cavorted like children exploring playing shopping What d she spend the most money on Out of ALL THAT STUFF what did she buy the most Dice From Chessex True story sir moon unit the mad permalink September 20 2007 its true you can waste 20 s but dont throw those dice out you can bleed the ones out over time or better yet spike someone elces dice bag with really moody dice i have one and like its owner its a primadonna it will only roll high

My Nerd Dream comes true! | StupidRanger.com into my pocket and pulled out a card We had made 100 cards with various t shirt design slogans on them and the one I handed to Gary was Gnomes are mining my butt for coal I didn t realize this until I saw that Gary was laughing at the card and I wanted to die a little when I realized which one it was Despite that it was really cool that Gary enjoyed the shirt design and that really made my day The story doesn t end there however The guy I was standing behind was also getting some books that looked VERY close my edition signed and Gary told him hm looks like the third printing so this is one of 3300 copies Since I didn t exactly know the pedigree of my books I decided to go and ask the knowledgeable folks over at Crazy Egor s I d link them but they don t appear to have a web presence and ask I got about three questions in with Mrs Egor when I mentioned that I had just got Gary to sign the books and she said oh why didn t you get Dave Arneson to sign them too He s sitting five feet behind you So I turn and lo and behold there was Dave Arneson author of the excellent Blackmoor setting and co author of Dungeons and Dragons He was equally kind and eager to sign my books He even signed my Blackmoor supplement which was very cool because he was selling an updated edition of the Blackmoor setting at the convention He was recovering from foot surgery and did not want to have pictures taken but the experience was so great that I doubt I will need photos to remember it by A

The Most Amazing Breakfast I Will Ever Die At | StupidRanger.com polite way I hope I had the choice of being a spectator or being killed with the rest of the players I didn t come all this way to spectate I wanted to be killed by the best So I lined up with the players Before too long a man in a black shirt came out and everybody started cheering I had no idea who he was I thought they were cheering because they were going to let us in It was shortly thereafter that I was struck with a very important realization Tracy Hickman was a dude Up until last week I thought Dragonlance was written by two women How do you love and cherish a person s creative works for almost 20 years AND NOT KNOW THIS I felt the geek cred seeping out of my body and I wondered how I was to survive the next two hours They marched us into the ballroom seperately from the spectators and somehow or another my row got ushered into the spectators section and a staffer came over and put us back with the players about two rows back from where we should have sat Soon the event started and Tracy and Laura Hickman OK I admit it I thought they were sisters until last week came out and started singing a parody of The Phantom of the Opera A safety presentation was then shown and then the carnage began You had to say why your character was there right then and it had better not be boring or you died That let you live one round And you better DO something brave stupid or entertaining the next round or you would die Also if anyone around you did something stupid you died You were pretty much hosed I m usually pretty good at coming up with random funny ideas I was choking Hard I thought briefly about several jokes about how I got there ranging from I m here to pick up goth chicks to my mom and dad gave each other a special hug which thankfully someone else did and he killed them on the spot But when I was called up to go backstage I was out of ideas About 30 seconds before I got onstage my random thought generator kicked in and I got an idea A funny one I just hoped everyone else thought it was too So I got on stage and I was just about to sit down when Tracy Hickman says STOP STOP STOP We have a celebrity that needs to be killed next And I look to my left and Gary Gygax walks on stage The crowd goes completely bat shit insane and a stupid indelible grin crosses my face I almost forget to sit down when Tracy tells us to And that s when I realize I can only vaguely remember what I was going to say Fortunately there was one guy before me and he said something dumb and